Please
by dusk-dreamer-midnight-thief
Summary: She was the friend he never knew he had, not until it was too late.


_A/N: Something that I was inspired to write after lamenting on my Tumblr about what happened between Severus and Charity during the Deathly Hallows. If you would like to read that and more of my Severus angst, please follow me on said Tumblr at the-astronomy-mistress ;)_

 _I WILL get back to my in-progress fics very soon, I'm so sorry. I've had huge writers block when it came to them and I don't want to do haphazard jobs. I really feel bad that I haven't been updating regularly._

 _Enjoy._

* * *

She was the Muggle studies professor, and initially he was adverse to an amicable relationship. But they had been placed in the same stone fortress for years and over time they had both softened. Slowly Charity had begun to piece together the shards of his past and how his kind used to hunt down and murder Muggle advocates like her. She had to learn to slowly trust that his philosophy never had aligned with the Death Eaters anyway, and she found that eventually she believed it.

She is the friend Severus never admits to having, because he just can't see why she would want to talk to someone like him, support someone like him, care about him in any form.

He can't see why anyone would. So much so he can't allow himself to believe it.

Occasionally she had brought up distasteful memories for him. How she used to read the daily Muggle newspapers… bringing back painful memories of Tobias, on his good days, flipping viciously through the first few pages every morning and complaining about how the country had gone to the dogs to his quiet wife, who had by then become so dissociated from both Muggle and wizarding worlds that she barely found the energy to look at her husband, nor her son.

He'd remember Tobias by looking at her and then he would chastise himself for even connecting Charity, this woman who had given him nothing but time and pleasant thoughts, to the man who had turned him into the monster he felt inside.

The night he left Hogwarts, chased by a raging Hippogriff slashing at his skin, he thought about her… about them all… but specifically thought about how she sometimes laughed at his sardonic mutterings at the staff meetings, how she used to ask him how he was when no one else did, how she could bare to look him in the eyes and look completely unashamed. He lay awake all night and _thought_ , and missed, and hurt…

And then, even before he came back as a hated manifestation of himself, she was taken.

She had whimpered above the table containing a handful of people who would like nothing more than to see her tortured, cry out in pain for what she had spread within the magical community, and his eyes had been drawn to her, though he knew, even though his insides were screaming and thumping against his completely still mind, that he could not startle. Could not open his mouth. Could not raise a single eyebrow to her.

The way she had looked at him… pleaded with him that night…

 _"_ _Severus… please…"_

Gazed at him as though she had trusted him more than anyone in the world at that precise time; even forgoing the fact that he had, not more than a few months prior, killed Albus Dumbledore and watched as he had fallen from Sinistra's, another friends, tower and crumbled into a heap at their feet. She still wanted to believe he was good. That he could save her.

But he couldn't save her.

He watched, emotionless, as she took her final breath. As her cold eyes were still trained on his as her body dropped onto the table with a deafening thud. He wondered if she had left this world still believing and trusting that he would have saved her, would have done it if he could, and Merlin he fucking would… he fucking would. Or if, after she was met with nothing, Charity finally saw him for the monster he was.

But he was not even afforded the luxury of thinking on her a split second longer. Not with the Dark Lord pressing against ever pore in skin, waiting for an opportunity to bring him down and render everything he was fighting for a waste of time.

No, he was not going to let him win. Not now. He would not let her die for nothing. He would not let her final moments… scared, shivering, abandoned and disappointed… be in vain.

Charity deserved the world she had always strived for.

She deserved his sacrifice.

Even if he had believed, to his dying day, that he had never deserved her.


End file.
